Volunteers for a Better America

Wal-Mart Film Showing Dec. 16

Volunteers for a Better America and IBEW will host a free showing of the Wal-Mart film, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, produced by Brave New Films on December 16, 2005, at 6:30 at the union hall 2901 N. Mattis in Champaign, Illinois.  Refreshments will be available before the film and a panel of speakers will host a question and answer session immediately after.  Speakers will include Mike Herbert of IBEW, Professor Ron Peters of the University of Illinois, Larraine Cowart, and other community leaders from local churches and government (to be updated as invited speakers are confirmed). 

The Hall seats about 150 persons and admission will be on a first-come, first-served basis.   To sign up for the film so we have some idea how many to expect (and whether we need to arrange another showing), please RSVP at this site, here.  The film runs about one hour and a half, and we expect the panel discussion to last about 45 minutes (or as long as there are questions from the floor). 

We hope that you will join us for the film and the interesting discussion afterwards.  If  you would like more information about activism about Wal-Mart's labor, management, and purchasing practices and the impact of those practices on all of us, check out these sites:  Wal-Mart Watch  and Wake Up Wal-Mart.  If you would like more information on showings of the Wal-Mart Film and other activist groups that are involved, go to Brave New Films website here.

Detainees Rights (2)

The Senate has passed a bill, sponsored by Republican Lindsay Graham, that fits right in the Bush Administration's executive control pocket--removal of habeas corpus rights to judicial process in U.S. courts--for detainees at Guantanamo.  Habeas review is the most basic due process right that permits a person being held to challenge the grounds for his or her detention.  In the case of detainees from the Administration's so-called "war on terror,"  courts would review whether the Administration's decision to treat a detainee as an "enemy combatant" is appropriate.  That categorization entails a number of consequences, and under the Administration's apparent views towards use of cruel, degrading and inhumane treatment, worrisome concerns about possible rendering to other countries for torture or seclusion in a "black site" somewhere around the globe. 

The following is a letter from the President of the American Bar Association condemning the Senate's action in removing this most basic liberty right from people who may be entirely innocent and whose labelling as enemies has been handled by a military that has proven itself incompetent to protect basic rights and incapable of appreciating the importance of speedy trial determinations.

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Michael S. Greco 321 N. Clark St. Chicago, IL 60610-4714 (312) 988-5109 FAX: (312) 988-5100 AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION President

November 15, 2005 The U.S. Senate last week adopted with no hearings and with little debate Senator Lindsey Graham's proposal to eliminate habeas corpus rights for Guantanamo detainees, denying them access to federal courts. The American Bar Association urges the senators to reconsider and defeat that enormous change to our fundamental legal system. Throughout our nation's history, starting with the defense by lawyer, later president, John Adams of Massachusetts, of the British soldiers who fired on patriots in the Boston Massacre, it has been our commitment to basic principles of justice, even for the most unpopular among us, that has allowed us to maintain the high moral ground in the world, the most strategically important territory for us to occupy as we struggle with the enemies of freedom. Our influence in the world is directly affected by our actions with respect to those we detain. The prisoners in Guantanamo have been held there, largely incommunicado, for four years. That fact alone offends our heritage of due process and fairness. The writ of habeas corpus was developed precisely to prevent the prolonged detention of individuals without charge, by allowing those held to petition the federal courts. To eliminate the right of habeas corpus would be shocking to our nation. As Senator Graham himself has stated repeatedly, in the battle against terrorism we cannot allow ourselves to become like the enemy. Adoption of his amendment would undermine the very principles that distinguish us from our enemies. Michael Greco, President

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After complaints from Americans across the country, a "compromise" has been worked out in the Senate.  The compromise still removes habeas rights, but at least does allow a detainee who has had a military tribunal hearing a right of appeal of that decision to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. 

The compromise itself falls far short of the legal process that we should provide to anyone that we have detained.  It assumes the accuracy of the military's categorization of a person as an enemy combatant, and does not permit challenges to that categorization through the judicial process.  The evidence is clear that the government has held hundreds (counting Iraq, thousands) of persons for months and years without verifying their status as enemies.  More than 500 prisoners have finally been released from Guantanamo.  Among those, many are not charged in their home country--all evidence would suggest that they were innocent of terrorism and merely inadvertently caught up in the dragnet of anti-terrorist fervor.  These are the people who will have no redress from the courts if they cannot go to court to challenge their status, as determined on the ultimate sayso of the person holding the office of President of the United States.  The power of dictators is based on removal of rights such as these.  We should not move down that slippery slope by our actions towards those detained in Afghanistan, Iraq and even within our own borders as in the case of citizen  Pareda who was stowed away in a military brig.

This news comes as Congress prepares to extend the so-called "Patriot" Act without making substantial changes to remove the noxious provisions threatening the liberty of every American.  Military access to book purchases, library information-seeking and military databases storing concentrated information on ordinary American citizens are a significant threat to Democracy.  Congress should bury most of those provisions and restore the liberty that true patriots have fought for throughout our history.

This Congress, and this person holding the office of President, have so far shown an inability to understand the importance of the most basic due process rights.  Let's hope that they can get the message now.

Judicial Nominations: is Alito like Ginsburg?

The talk in all the media these days is about Bush's third Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito.  As we learn more about Alito, it is clear that his ideology runs to the extreme right.  He explicitly asserted an anti-abortion right position in 1985.  His views tend to be to the right of even the conservative members of his current court.  He would undoubtedly move the Supreme Court to the right, in decisions dealing with fundamental issues of extreme importance to the country at this time.  It appears clear that corporatist viewpoints would be furthered; individual rights (other than property rights) would be whittled away.

The right-wing is claiming that it would be inappropriate to consider his ideology in making the decision to confirm.  This claim is almost laughable in the context of their consideration of Harriet Miers, who was rejected by them primarily on ideological grounds as not being conservative enough.  Remember that Harriet Miers was also pressured to withdraw her naming, demonstrating that the commitment to an "up or down" vote applies only to those candidates that the right-wing already has decided will get an up vote.

Even during the Roberts confirmation process, the right-wing talk was busy bringing up Ruth Bader Ginsburg's nomination as an example of the Republican's willingness to confirm any Democratic president's nominee.  To hear them tell it, Justice Ginsburg's confirmation came even though Republicans considered her an extremist on the left. This "Ginsburg Fallacy" was brought up again on the night of Alito's confirmation, by Sean Hannity. The facts, however, are otherwise.  Ginsburg was--and is--a centrist whose selection was pushed by Republicans.  See the Washington Post account, here. 

Let's hope the rest of the media take guidance from the Post's approach.  They should set the record straight rather than permitting the right-wing to spin the American people a yarn yet one more time.

Detainees Rights

Senators reached a compromise last night to their plan, approved 49-42 last week, to prevent detainees abroad from having any right to judicial review of their detention.  The Washington Post today  here notes that the compromise is better than the original removal of review, but still raises significant concerns in the case of a government that has a known record for holding persons merely suspected of terrorist activity for years, rendering some to countries that are known to commit torture, and engaging in abusive practices in military and CIA prisons (including the maintenance of "black sites" without access by the Red Cross) that leave our record on human rights suspect in the eyes of the world.  The first two paragraphs of the story are worth quoting in full.

"HERE'S A QUIZ: What is the proper congressional response to an administration that is holding prisoners in secret facilities with no Red Cross access, asserting the right to treat those prisoners cruelly and inhumanely, and insisting that the president -- and the president alone -- can make the rules for how all detainees are to be dealt with and when (if ever) they are to be released?

If your answer is that Congress should further enable the administration by barring prisoners' last chance of judicial review, then you're on the same wavelength as Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and a plurality of his colleagues. Last week the Senate voted, 49 to 42, in favor of Mr. Graham's proposal to strip the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear challenges by inmates at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to their confinement or to the administration's plans to try some of them in a kind of military court. Senators announced a bipartisan compromise last night in the form of a plan that would allow limited appeals rights when military commissions convict someone or when they are designated enemy combatants. Assuming it is adopted tomorrow, that would be a significant improvement over the original language, although important problems would remain. As senators continue to work toward a final version, they should think hard about what they are doing and how their action will be perceived in the world."

We have compromised our integrity by the mere appearance of condoning torture, and may actually have committed torture regularly in our prisons.  We have held thousands of detainees, many of them innocent, in prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, without sufficient process.  We have held persons in Guantanamo for years without any rights.  It is time that those persons were provided appropriate due process rights.  The Senate's first approach--to deny all habeas rights to persons held abroad--was wrong.   Let's hope the Senate does that "hard thinking" recommended by the Post and comes up with a policy for judicial review of those held by the military and intelligence arms of the government that we Americans can be proud of.

If not now, when?

As more Americans come to terms with the way this nation rushed to war against Saddam based on discredited intelligence sources like "Curveball" and stale reports from past intelligence sources, the scales of ignorance are beginning to fall from our eyes.  Seeing the distortions, we now look more closely at each of the different programs put forward by this Administration.  We compare the waste of dollars for corporate allies to perform the reconstruction of the Iraqi areas that our military devastated to the still fumbled waste of monies to provide shelter for Katrina's evacuees and the rebuilding of levees that, we now learn, may have been shoddily built by Army contractees in the first place.   We learn to question the reports of Iraqi "insurgents" killed, and wonder just how many innocent men, women and children have been slaughtered in this horrible war.  See here for more about Iraqi civilian deaths.

As we watch the corporatization of our universities and the privatization of our military and the monetization of our elections, we worry.  Can a university dedicate itself to the fundamental research that has always been the driving energy of human civilization if it is spending most of its time chasing the corporate dollars that promise big labs and bigger name recognition?  Can a military dedicate itself to defending our people and our society if it is spending most of its money for corporate mercenaries whose focus on the bottom line allows them to cut corners while the military brass leave the troops on the ground without adequately protective armor?  Can a government elected by kow-towing to corporations and their owners and spending millions of their money to secure its seat expect to deliberate on proposals for the good of society rather than simply shoveling legislation towards its corporate masters?  These are the questions we have to ask, now that we doubt the sincerity and the good intentions of the heads of state.

We worry most, perhaps, about an endless war to secure a nameless goal on behalf of a people that wants our occupation forces to be gone from their land.  We are building permanent military bases along the oil pipelines in the North of Iraq, but failing to provide decent health care to the children.  We are continuing to bomb homes, even when they contain women and children, and to imprison "detainees" without providing due process to determine guilt.  We continue to condemn other nations for what they do not do that we think they should do, but we continue to render prisoners to countries that commit torture and to hold prisoners in "black sites" in the secret recesses of the world where we may commit torture. 

This war can bring us no good; nor can it bring the world good.  Our occupation of Iraq is merely inciting terrorists who will grow in numbers the longer American troops remain on Iraqi soil.  It is time to bring our troops home, close the new bases we established in Iraq and Afghanistan, and let detainees go unless we provide them a fair trial.

See this article in this week's The Nation for a novel approach to this issue--taking on the corporatist establishment by pushing politicians to make ending the Iraq occupation a top priority.

Secret Police and Torture

Today's New York Times carries an interesting article on the "Heavy Hand of the Secret Police Impeding Reform in Arab World."  It discusses the many ways that the role of governmental police )the mukhabarat, in Arab societies) in protecting national security can become a role of the government in using "preventive" arrests to stifle dissent and prevent democratic discussion of everything from ideas about ideal government to problems with corrupt governments.

Recall Ari Fleisher's early post-9/11 comment that those who express dissent or disapproval of actions after 9/11 are aiding the enemy.  Mr. Bush recently reiterated that theme in a speech to Veterans intended to recast himself as the "Warrior" president making the right decisions to protect us during the "war on terror."   Cheney, who most directly linked Saddam to 9/11 and continued claimed "certainty" that Saddam had WMD long after the invasion had substantiated that he had not, is actively lobbying against the bill (already passed by the Senate) that would make it clear that the United States does not treat prisoners cruelly, degradingly or inhumanely.

Let's hope that Congress reads the Times.  The current push for a President with enormously enhanced executive powers, including the "right" for the CIA to torture detainees who the President alone determines represent a threat to our national security and the potential control of the military over emergency responses to disasters in the country (from terrorist attacks to major weather emergencies) is a cause for grave concern. 

News Gazette Stories

When a local newspaper covers a story, one hopes that it will provide information that readers need to know to understand the context of the story and to make their own determinations about the reasonableness of the position being espoused by people in the news.

Today's story in the News Gazette about Tim Johnson, local congressman from the 15th Congressional District, and his support for Winkel for the U.S. Attorney position from Central Illinois did not satisfy that desire.   There is not much discussion about Mr. Winkel's qualifications (or lack thereof) for the position, though he admits he has no experience as a prosecutor.  There is not much about the importance of the position and the types of cases with which a U.S. Attorney may be involved.  There is no information about the people who hold U.S. Attorney positions in other parts of Illinois, such as the Northern or Southern Districts, or elsewhere in the country, to provide some context so that the people of Central Illinois can understand the caliber and experience of people ordinarily appointed to such positions.  The media story seems to reduce to a tale of partisan opportunism--how to give a retiring politician a new position at high pay and do it in a way that lets the party's choice as a replacement effectively get an "interim appointment" that (the party hopes) gives a real boost from incumbency to being able to keep the seat later.  The people don't get a say in the matter--it is all between the two Republican Party chairs in Champaign and Vermillion Counties (naming the successor to Winkel) and Republican leaders in Congress such as Dennis Hastert to put the nomination forward. Of course, Illinois' senators are both Democrats, so other perspectives will come in at that point.  On the whole, though, it appears that the Republicans see a win-win for the party.  The question is whether it is a lose-lose for the people.

One of the U.S. Attorneys for Illinois, of course, has been in the news a good bit lately.  That's Peter Fitzgerald, who indicted Cheney's former chief of staff "Scooter" Libby for obstruction of justice and perjury (among other charges).  Mr. Fitzgerald is universally acknowledged to be a highly qualified and able Republican-appointed prosecutor with considerable experience whose handling of the investigation into the Plame affair has won him accolades from both sides of the aisle in Congress. 

Mr. Winkel appears to fall rather short in comparison.  The News Gazette does not provide much information to go on, but you can find out more at the Tim Johnson Watch blog, here (and at other blogs referenced therein).

Cheney's Dark Side

As we all know now, we hold many prisoners at Guantanamo, where they have little redress and little hope of a decent life.  We hold many others in prisons in Iraq, where there have been stories of people getting lost in the bureaucracy, and stories of prisoners being murdered.  We've seen the pictures of abuse in Abu Ghraib, and heard tales of similar abuse at Guantanamo, including desecration of the Koran, and at other prisons we run (or our hired mercenaries run) throughout our Middle Eastern colonies.  We ordinary Americans have said that it must stop, but the White House and military chiefs claim it is just a few rotten bad apples.  They continue to claim this, despite the abundant evidence of a policy permitting torture and encouraging sadistic treatment of prisoners.  Waterboarding has turned up as a sanctioned activity in every military prison for terrorist suspects that we know anything about.

Dana Priest's Washington Post story revealed even more about our treatment of prisoners during this period of undermining the due process that is the foundation of our country.  Read about the CIA's "black sites" at an earlier post here.

Congress is finally facing up to the shame that the United States has brought upon itself through its treatment of prisoners taken in its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.  John McCain and 89 other Senators have sent a clear message to Rumsfeld and Bush that torture will no longer be tolerated.   The bill provides a blanket ban against "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment of persons under custody or control of the United States government."

But Bush and Cheney have refused to accept that verdict.  Cheney, in fact, is actively campaigning against Congress' anti-torture bill.  He wants to be sure that at least the CIA is exempted.  Cheney, that is, believes that the CIA should have the right to commit torture--inhumane treatment of prisoners--whenever it wants to.  He believes Americans should "work, though, sort of the dark side ... in the shadows in the intelligence world."  See this Nov. 7 Washington Post story by Dan Fromkin.  Cheney's argument, apparently, is that the bad guys do bad things so we should to, using "any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective."  Id.

We might have hoped that after Abu Ghraib Mr. Bush would have recognized the American people's disgust with the idea of American torturers.  Or at least that he would acknowledge the advice of experts in interrogation that information obtained through torture is inevitably less credible than information obtained through more patient, legal methods of questioning.  Or at a minimum that he would see that his stance favoring torture garners negative attention throughout the Arab world.  If he has any doubts, he should read Richard Cohen's editorial in the November 8 Washington Post about the views of a Muslim driver in Jordan named Bassam.  Cohen calls Cheney "the unashamed lobbyist for torture." Id.

Mr. Bush, however, seems as usual to be under the influence of his powerful VP.  The Nov. 7 Washington Post story by Dan Fromkin reports this response to a query about holding prisoners in secret prisons, without Red Cross access, and Mr. Bush's general support for a CIA exemption from the proposed ban on torture. (he has threatened to veto the McCain bill).

"The executive branch has the obligation to protect the American people; the legislative branch has the obligation to protect the American people.  And we are aggressively doing that.  We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice.  We are gathering information about where the terrorists may be hiding.  We are trying to disrupt their plots and plans.  Anything we do to that effort, to that end, in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law.  We do not torture."

There was a time when the phrase "bringing them to justice" meant that people who were suspected of having committed heinous crimes would be brought to trial so that their case, and the case against them, could be heard in an impartial tribunal and judged according to clear principles of law.  Mr. Bush appears to use the phrase to imply mere capture and detention on his say-so. 

Furthermore, Mr. Bush makes it clear that he thinks "anything we do...any activity we conduct" is automatically within the law.  It is as though Mr. Bush believes the defensive arguments devised several years ago by his counsel's office, suggesting that as Commander-in-Chief he can take any actions whatsoever and those actions will be per se lawful.  With that world view, it is easy to see how he can utter such an apparently contradictory statement of being able to "do anything" yet "not commit torture."  It is clear that Mr. Bush thinks that the anything he is entitled to command done includes torture, whenever he thinks it appropriate.  Why else would he and Cheney seek an exemption from a ban on "cruel and degrading treatment" unless they thought they might use it.  Yet he can in the same breath aver that nothing illegal will be done, since his underlings have convinced him that any action he takes during war is legal.

No wonder he appears to want us to be in a perpetual state of war.  In his view of things, that apparently means perpetual power for the military-industrial complex.  And no one asking those pesky questions about how the military and the CIA are treating the people they have locked up in brigs and prison camps around the world.

Globalization and Market Economics

Economic theory has recently exploded as a means of assessing appropriate policies from foreign policy to tax policy and tort laws to environmental policy.  Even elementary school children are familiar with cost-benefit analysis, and may at times employ it successfully to inveigle something out of their parents (the benefit of providing us this treat now will be far greater than the cost of not doing so.....)

Interesting, then, was the news in the October 29, 2005 New York Times Business Section, that the efficient market hypothesis is dead.  The paper covers a breakfast at Columbia Business School hosted by Bruce Greenwald, Robert Heilbrunn professor of finance and asset management.  See Joseph Nocera, The Heresy That Made Them Rich, New York Times, Oct. 29, 2005, at B1, here. 

"Most business schools emphasize modern potfolio theory, which has as its central tenet that the market is so efficient it can't be beaten with any regulatory.  Portfolio theory stresses ... diversification as the best way to spread market risk. ...As [Warren] Buffet [said] recently, "You couldn't advance in a finance department in this country unless you taught that the world was flat.""

"[T]he value investing program that Mr. Greenwald runs preaches something else ... that the market can be beaten. ... A 'value' stock is, at bottom, a cheap stock.  And a value investor is someone who has the facility to ferret out cheap stocks that don't deserve to be cheap. ... "For a value investor, the only relevant questions are: Is it a good business?  And will it be a better business in five years?" "  Id. 

In essence, value investing claims that the "[e]fficient market theory is basically dead." Id.   That statement is particularly interesting given the way claims of efficient markets drive free-market arguments for government not to regulate in order to let the markets determine how best to handle problems.

Similar claims are made for globalization.  Just let companies have a free hand to globalize their business, the claim goes, and everyone's boat will float higher.  The rich will get richer, but the poor will have work and do better as well.  Interestingly enough, another prominent academician is contesting that theory as well.  Dani Rodik has recently written about the problems presented by poor workers from globalization, as promoted by many of the huge multinational corporations.  See this article in Harvard Magazine.  An excerpt from the beginning of the article appears below.

"Globalization has brought little but good news to those with the products, skills, and resources to market worldwide. But does it also work for the world's poor?

That is the central question around which the debate over globalization—in essence, free trade and free flows of capital—revolves. Antiglobalization protesters may have had only limited success in blocking world trade negotiations or disrupting the meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), but they have irrevocably altered the terms of the debate. Poverty is now the defining issue for both sides. The captains of the world economy have conceded that progress in international trade and finance has to be measured against the yardsticks of poverty alleviation and sustainable development.

[Many countries have failed to benefit from globalization.]   Latin American countries were buffeted by a never-ending series of boom-and-bust cycles in capital markets and experienced growth rates significantly below their historical averages. Most of the former socialist economies ended the decade at lower levels of per-capita income than they started it—and even in the rare successes, such as Poland, poverty rates remained higher than under communism."

CIA Prisons

In a related post on Volunteers for a Better America here, we noted the Washington Post's revelation on November 2 that the CIA runs "black site" prisons in countries around the globe.  Those prisons hold secret prisoners that exist in a never-never world of interrogations and indefinite detention without redress.  They may also be subject to torture.

While the Post devoted a large space to the story, and small town newspapers picked the story up as a filler in later papers, media broadcasts have hardly mentioned it.  It appears that stories about military and intelligence prisons in countries that may torture and even sometimes kill detainees is just old hat.

FAIR points out another element of this story--the fact that the Post acceded to the U.S. government officials' requests not to name the countries in which the CIA secret prisons are located.  By so doing, the Post became complicit with the White House and those countries in the illegal detention of prisoners in violation of their laws.  You can read the FAIR story here.